What do you know, I set a deadline and actually met it for once! Episode 1.1 is now online. You can check it out here, or on my Youtube channel here. I'd like to hear how I'm doing in terms of indoctrinating educating my viewers, so if you have any feedback, feel free to let me know!

I also have some new posters and songs uploaded to the Patreon page for your enjoyment (note: posters will only be visible to $2+ patrons, and songs to $5+ patrons). Enjoy!

It looks like I ought to be able to keep a steady production pace from here on. Each episode takes a few years weeks to complete, so I'm expecting Episode 1.2 to be released at some point in March. In the meantime, I'll be making regular uploads of new posters and music to the Patreon page. Stay tuned for future updates!

Episode 1.1 is pretty well fleshed-out by this point, and I'm expecting it to be released sometime within the next week or so, definitely by the end of February. In the meantime, the $2-and-up supporters on my Patreon page will see that a few new wallpapers have been uploaded. Not only do these offer a sneak-peek at the upcoming episode, but they also serve as pretty badass posters ;-) Patrons can find them on my creator page here. Peace!

In other good news, it looks like I've finally learned everything I need to in order to kick this webseries into gear. Assuming I can keep up the production schedule that I kept for this first video, the next installment should be released at some point in February. ...unless I hit another slew of technical problems and get sidetracked for seven more months :-P Time will tell!

It's been a while since I've had an update, so I figured that while the videos are slowly grinding along, I'd share what's on my mind. I'm thinking of making a recurring series of joke-technology ads, as in "hahah, no, this doesn't really exist... although we have the technology to make this happen right now, just saying." Consider it the byproduct of an active imagination married to an education in engineering. With that in mind...

The holiday season involves a lot of stress for everyone. For some, it means braving the roiling seas of malcontented bargain-hunters who will gleefully curb-stomp you to death for that last rotating waffle iron ("but it guarantees an even browning on all sides!"). For others, the season is accompanied by unprecedented spending that makes your bank account balance sink faster than the Lusitania. Many have also come to associate the holidays with commuting long distances through fierce weather and dangerous travel conditions*. But there's one thing more intolerable than all of these factors put together: those infectious, hell-spawned Christmas songs that follow you to the ends of the earth! Nothing about this time of year is quite so repulsive as the relentless acoustic onslaught of those damnable jingles that abuse your ears with their revoltingly-saccharine melodies so painfully often that they make the idea of drowning in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic seem an appealing alternative.

*Also like the Lusitania.

These things follow you everywhere.

The undying wails of bygone eras lie dormant in the back of radio broadcast storerooms and playlist shuffles like some long-forgotten leftovers buried in the back of the fridge, slowly festering and putrifying for months behind the cartons of Chinese take-out boxes and old orange juice bottles until the fateful day when an unsuspecting victim opens the door and falls prey to their rancid odors.

No place can offer safety, nowhere can a person find refuge from the inexorable tide of maudlin warbling the likes of which would make one of Santa's little helpers puke a rainbow of candy canes and gumdrops.

Around every corner it's there waiting for you; it's hiding in every elevator stereo, every movie theater preview, every tech-support hold line. This tinkling, sparkling amalgamation of reindeer stool and glitter has suffused itself into every corner of creation!

But, weary consumer, have no fear, for you're living in the future, where problems only happen to people who can't engineer! And so, people of earth, I present to you the Animus Anthem Department of Technological Services' Christmas-Canceling Headphones™! Keep the holiday haranguing at bay with the latest in audio-processing technology.

Here's how it works: you install an app on your phone that uses its microphone to persistently scan for any potential musical atrocities waiting to be committed against your ears. When a Christmas song is detected, the phone will identify the song and retrieve the exact waveform of the entire recording (which shouldn't be difficult, considering that they've been playing the same damned Bing Crosby LP for the last 75 years). The waveform is then inverted so that, when played at the same time as the offending jingle, the two noises cancel each other out to produce silence. Then, as an added layer of protection, the app will go into your music library and play a song randomly chosen from your favorited playlists, effectively drowning out the glitzy pop-apocalypse and replacing it with music that doesn't send you into a spiraling vortex of headaches and rage.

So I just got back from a week's vacation with my family in the Poconos. In the basement of the place we rented, stacked between copies of the sort of pulpy pop-fiction appropriate for most vacationers, there was a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Hot damn, actual literature!* Honestly, I would have settled for some campy mystery novel.

*The difference between pulpy garbage and literature is that nobody remembers when literature was published.

After reading it, I decided to look up some of Hemingway's bio, since I didn't know too much about him. Turns out that a good part of the story was influenced by his real-life experiences; Hemingway used to vacation in the Bahamas where he went fishing for tuna and marlin in the Gulf Stream. Whenever he got close to reeling one in, it would tire out and become easy prey for nearby sharks, which would tear the fish to pieces long before he could get it into the boat. The solution Hemingway came up with? Blow the sharks away with a sub-machine gun.

I was always under the impression that fishing was supposed to be a leisurely form of recreation; I can only assume that Hemingway golfed with hand grenades.